Traveling Adventures

Coming home from our trip was a bit crazy. Thank goodness we decided to drive to Burlington the day before our flights. What should have been a 3.5 hour drive took 8 hours!!! A bunch of our group left early the same day with intentions of getting to Toronto (8 hrs) and some to Detroit (12 hrs). They had to bail and ended up in Cornwall, Ontario for the night. They made it to Detroit the following night at 11pm and then my parents and Steven had one more full day of driving to Peoria after that (another 8 hrs). Not a whole lot worse than flying this time around.

At the airport, we find out we're "most likely delayed an hour and a half" but should get to the gate anyway since they may try to board early in an attempt to take off sooner. Well, we boarded at 3 and finally took off at 5:10, so that was fun. They actually announced that we couldn't get off the plane since being fully boarded increased our chances of leaving sooner. They followed that with "If you would still like to get off the plane, you are welcome to do so, but we will not be able to let you back on and cannot give you your luggage." So nice of them to give options! :-) We finally taxi in around 6:30 only to find out there are no available gates to pull into, so we have to sit another 20 minutes before deboarding. So, after 4 hours, we're still on the east coast - Newark/New Jersey now. Luckily, we were already confirmed on the 7:40 connection to SF, but of course it was running an hour late. One bonus; we finally got to eat a real meal and there was a food court right by our gate. The drawback: our plan to take BART was shot since it closed at midnight. Rani bent over backwards and picked us up in SF (an hour drive) at 1am instead of the original 10:30 pick up in Pleasant Hill (20 min drive) ... so nice of her!

But wait ... there's more! Our luggage had a worse trip than we did apparently. They loaned us a car seat for Reagan and managed to deliver our stuff the following evening around 11pm. So, all is well now other than the torrential rain storms that just started today around here. Snow can be annoying, but it's much prettier.